Friday, October 31, 2014

Behind the Pages explores some of our favourite features and fashion shoots in AnOther Magazine and Another Man

Words by Laura AllsopOctober 28, 2014

Yayoi KusamaPumpkin, 2014

As Halloween looms and pumpkins take centre stage, we consider Yayoi Kusama's lifelong obsession with the bulbous fruit, in an extract from the latest issue of AnOther Magazine

Yayoi Kusama has carried her obsessive compulsions ever since her childhood in Japan, when she first experienced the hallucinations that would recur throughout her life; it was by representing and replicating them that she was able to confront them. “I fight pain, anxiety and fear every day, and the only method I have found that relieves my illness is to keep creating art,” she explains today. Her condition, as she defines it in her 2002 autobiography Infinity Net, is one of “depersonalisation” – the phenomenon of “experiencing a loss of personality”, a defense against trauma and an explanation for why in her performance work she has sought self-obliteration by merging with her dot and net-filled environments. Though she became renowned in 1960s New York for riotous, naked “happenings” that were emblematic of the free-love era, it was a fear of dematerialising and indeed sex that fuelled them.

"I would confront the spirit of the pumpkin, forgetting everything else and concentrating my mind entirely on the form before me"

Yayoi Kusama

Yet, colour and love, as much as anxiety, suffuse her paintings and sculptures, whether of phallic protrusions, flowers or pumpkins. It is to these latter, bulbous forms that Kusama has lately returned, and she is presenting new sculptures and paintings of pumpkins at Victoria Miro gallery in London, exploring new materials and methods such as bronze and mosaic-making. As with many of the motifs that populate her work, her love of the humble pumpkin stretches back to her childhood, when she first encountered one growing on its vine and it began to speak to her, “in a most animated manner”. Since then she has found them to be “such tender things to touch, so appealing in colour and form”. A painting she made as a young woman of some pumpkins, using traditional Nihonga materials, won her a prize in a local competition, and with monastic fervour, she took to tirelessly reproducing them, mastering every contusion and bump. “I would confront the spirit of the pumpkin, forgetting everything else and concentrating my mind entirely on the form before me… I spent as much as a month facing a single pumpkin,” she wrote in her autobiography. Her pumpkins are now instantly recognisable, brightly coloured and covered in beetling black dots.

Yayoi Kusama in her studio Photography by Go Itami

The tenderness Kusama describes is certainly visible in the new paintings, with their pleasingly swollen, rippling forms. The bronze sculptures similarly appeal to touch, as well as inviting peaceful contemplation. Yet while there is the suggestion of tranquility in these works, the artistry and energy behind them is as feverish as ever. “I rest very little and now I am an insomniac; every day I am creating a new world by making my work. I am determined to live to be 100 years old and continue to struggle with my art.”

Yayoi Kusama: Bronze Pumpkins is at Victoria Miro Gallery until Decmber 19. Read the full article in the latest issue of AnOther Magazine, out now.

Yayoi Kusama

"My passion has never changed"

There's something innately paradoxical about the life and work of polka dot-obsessed Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama: She explores the infinite through the intimate. On one hand, she claims that her artworks — repetitious polka dot-covered sculptures, paintings and installations, and constellation-inspired mirrored rooms that give the impression of endlessness — represent something very personal (the hallucinations that plague her), and that the process of creating them acts as a sort of therapy. On the other hand, her patterned pieces seem factory produced, and the reality is that anybody could reproduce many of Yayoi Kusama's pieces with little technical difficulty. Yet, despite the simplicity and universality of her motif, Yayoi is inextricably present in her artwork.

Kusama is considered a protagonist of the New York City avant-garde movement of the sixties, having organized the city's iconic Body Festivals and exhibited alongside artists like Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg, but her work is universal. Her boldly colored polka dots have been plastered across everything from trees to naked bodies to beach balls to Louis Vuitton's latest accessory line. Naturally, appropriating the polka dot, making it synonymous with her name (she's widely known as the Polka Dot Princess) has taken considerable persistence, which has led critics and a number of her contemporaries to conclude that she's extremely savvy, a public relations mastermind rather a than a tortured soul.

This paradox extends into her recognized persona. Yayoi is a reclusive enigma who has voluntarily resided at the Seiwa Hospital for the Mentally Ill since 1973. However, much of her earlier life is detailed explicitly in her autobiography Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama. In interviews, she remains poker-faced, divulging little about her personal life. At the same time, the concepts she'll happily discuss: her mental health and its influence on her art, and the overwhelming sense of the infinite she feels threatens to obviate her, could hardly be more personal.

Take for example, her 1954 painting "Flower (D.S.P.S)," about which she stated, "One day I was looking at the red flower patterns of the tablecloth on the table, and when I looked up I saw the same pattern covering the ceiling, the windows and the walls, and finally all over the room, my body and the universe. I felt as if I had begun to self-obliterate, to revolve in the infinity of endless time and the absoluteness of space and to be reduced to nothingness. As I realized it was actually happening and not just in my imagination, I was frightened. I knew I had to run away lest I should be deprived of my life by the spell of the red flowers. I desperately ran up the stairs. The steps below me began to fall apart and I fell down the stairs, straining my ankle."

So, has Yayoi Kusama finally achieved a level of internal peace through solitude and the therapeutic repetition of painting spots? And, also, could she hope to? As Albert Einstein once quipped, "Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results." To quote schizophrenic sci-fi novelist Philip K. Dick, whose work also explored identity and perception, "The problem with introspection is that it has no end." There is no end in sight for Yayoi, who — despite being 83 years old — is perhaps more famous, relevant and indeed prolific than ever before.

Zac Bayly: What is life like at your residence? Could you tell us about a typical day, or a specific day (like the day that you answer these questions)?

Yayoi Kusama: I had a meeting about the new building for my foundation and after that I painted new paintings for hours.

I hope this is not too personal a question, but could you describe a recent hallucination and explain how it influenced you whilst creating a particular piece of art?

Since my childhood, I’ve been suffering from hallucinations. However after I met a good psychiatrist, my condition got better. But I’ve made many works based on my hallucinations. I just kept sketching whenever I saw hallucinations.

Do you feel bound by the confines of reality?

No, I don’t feel bound by the confines of reality.

Over the years, you have described your work as "art medicine." Can you explain how creating new works is therapeutic?

Usually art production moderates my mood and I hope it also makes my physical condition get better. I keep on working from morning till night and am absorbed in art production so much that I forget my meals.

Does creating art make you happy? Is there anything else in life that brings you a sense of joy, like staring at the stars or going to the beach (your work often reminds me of infinite stars or grains of sand)?

I’ve never thought if art makes me happy or not, but I don’t have anything else. Art is everything for me. I am pleased to have many fans and to be invited to hold solo exhibitions or international exhibitions all over the world.

How have you maintained your passion for polka dots over decades?

I get mountainous energy from creating works with polka dots and infinity nets motifs. So much that I never get tired.

How has your relationship with polka dots changed over the years?

My passion has never changed. I am desperate to create more and more works.

How do you feel about stripes?

I may paint it, but I have never thought about it particularly.

In what way does your visual art correspond with your work as a novelist and poet?

I have created paintings, sculptures, movies, fashions and also many poems about infinity polka dots and universal nets. There is no boundary between visual art works and literary work. I adopt everything that I’m interested in.

What are the shared themes in your work?

I hope the world becomes a peaceful place. A world of no terrorism, nor war. I have been sending the message “Love Forever” through my art.

Who have been the three most influential people in your life, and why?

I was never influenced by someone else. I believe in my own art.

What are you most proud of and what do you most regret?

I am proud that I am constantly building up a splendid development of my creation. I don’t have any regrets. I take responsibility for my life.

What is the most misunderstood aspect of your art?

My art is misunderstood in many respects. But with my proud philosophy of life, they all change into peace and happiness.

Do you have a dream project that you are yet to create?

My life is about changing the world of a changeless hymn of life, with the power of art.

What is the most important artwork of your career?

All of my works are equally most important. I have lived till now in awe of nihilism and the infinite universe, and with a faith of wanting to up hold their mysteriousness.

What do you love and hate most in the world?

I am interested in everything and I admire all the mysteries of the universe.

How would you like to be remembered?

I hope that Yayoi Kusama’s art, which took some decades to establish, will forever stay in people’s memory as the philosophy of my life.

One day I was looking at the red flower patterns of the tablecloth on a table, and when I looked up I saw the same pattern covering the ceiling, the windows and the walls, and finally all over the room, my body and the universe. I felt as if I had begun to self-obliterate, to revolve in the infinity of endless time and the absoluteness of space, and be reduced to nothingness. As I realized it was actually happening and not just in my imagination, I was frightened. I knew I had to run away lest I should be deprived of my life by the spell of the red flowers. I ran desperately up the stairs. The steps below me began to fall apart and I fell down the stairs straining my ankle.

Thursday, October 30, 2014

Waiting for Godot

Tomi Ungerer

Illustrator and author TOMI UNGERER was born on November 28, 1931 in Strasbourg, France, the capital of the Alsace region located on the west bank of the upper Rhine. The youngest of four children, Ungerer lost his father – an artist, engineer, and astronomical clockmaker – when he was three years old, and was raised by his mother and uncle. “I’ve always had the feeling,” Ungerer says, “that when he died, he passed me all his talents, just like that.”

Untitled, 2012

And then came the war. The Nazis began to occupy Alsace in 1940, when Ungerer was just nine years old, and he was prohibited from speaking French and forced to learn German in three months. Because of his artistic talents, he was conscripted by the Wehrmacht as a young illustrator – his first assignment was to draw “a Jew.” He saw his first dead person when he was 10, his neighbor Mr. Hermann. A self-proclaimed paranoiac, Ungerer has never been able to get rid of his fear of the war. “Death,” he says, “is perhaps the subject I’ve used most in my drawings.”

In 1956 Ungerer went to New York, where he instantly became an award-winning children’s book author, graphic designer, and illustrator for newspapers and magazines, and a leading figure in the world of advertising. He also made some of the most imaginative erotic art and adult literature to date, for which he was interrogated by the FBI, banned in American libraries, and forced to flee, first to Nova Scotia, in 1972, then later to Ireland, where he’s lived with his wife, Yvonne, for the last 37 years.

The recipient of numerous prestigious awards, including a European prize for culture and a Hans Christian Andersen Award for children’s literature, Ungerer is also an officer of the Légion d’honneur and a Council of Europe goodwill ambassador for childhood and education. He’s published more than 150 books, many of which are finally being reprinted, and is the only living illustrator ever to have a museum dedicated to his life and work. For Tomi Ungerer, far out just isn’t far enough.

Good morning, Tomi.

Good morning. I have to say that this morning I’m in a bit of a daze. Yesterday I had one of my days. I wrote all day for 12 hours and to keep on going I drank. I’m a bit fuzzy here, but I’ll just act according to my competence.

You’re a prolific writer, Tomi, which not many people know.

I love to write and I love words. It’s a three-language passion, because words bounce from one language to another and come back with another meaning. For me, a dictionary is like an alembic.

What’s that?

You know, what sorcerers used for distillation.

Untitled, from Totempole, 1968–1975.

A device to distill magic.

Yes, exactly.

What are you writing now, Tomi?

I always write in three languages. When I take notes I use one part of the page for English, one for French, and another for German, and it goes back and forth. I have a busy mind. The other day I was writing two short stories at the same time on two different sheets of paper.

In two different languages?

No, when I write a short story I normally stick to one language, unless there’s an equivalent that I can’t find right away.

Do you use each language for a different purposes?

That’s a very good question. I think I use English for humor, French for wit, and German for feelings. In a way it’s like the Three Faces of Eve.

Like multiple personalities.

That’s what I like.

French is very dry.

I like that too. In English there’s a profusion of synonyms. You have about five or ten words for one French word. I must say English is really ideal for playing around.

You can’t be as funny in French as you can in English.

That started after the renaissance when they cleaned up their act.

There’s an interesting book called The History of Shit, which talks about how the French language—l’Academie Française—was institutionalized the same time Paris set up its sewage system.

I love Old French because it was still a free-for-all. Today it’s the precision—the absolute accuracy—that I like about French. It’s more a crystallization process. In German you can put any two words together. If I can’t think of a word right away I can make one up.

How do you manage to work in so many different mediums?

I can’t even figure it out—it’s nearly impossible. I’m like a bee going from one flower to another. I’ll be working on a sculpture and then I’ll have to write something down and then on to something else. I just have to live with it, right?

But you also have to get it out.

It’s much more difficult to break through when you’re in so many different things.

Let’s talk about mechanics. You use mechanical elements in your children’s books–in the Mellops series there is a machine that can distill petrol from grass.

I’m just very mechanical. A whole part of my life involves invention. I designed what I call the Wheel of Energy for the French EDF [Électricité de France] in 2010. It was designed for the Shanghai World Expo, and it’s basically a mechanical animation of erotic frogs. Because sex is basically mechanical, in motion and position.

How does the Wheel of Energy work?

You take two rafts and put a watermill between them and anchor it. It can work on rising and pulling tides, or you can put it on a river. It just generates energy, it’s mobile, and you can put it anywhere.

Speaking of motor coordination, your father was a watchmaker.

He was an artist and an astronomer, a humanist really. He built astronomical clocks—many public clocks in eastern France are Ungerer clocks. I have mechanical ghosts in my family. It’s really in my blood.

Your book Fornicon (1971) is about simulating sex with machines.

That’s right. I actually built some of these machines working with Barbie dolls. My other book Schutzengel der Hölle (1986), or “the guardian angels of hell,” is about dominatrices in Hamburg. It hasn’t been published in English, but it documents a form of specialized prostitution: the mechanics of fantasy, if you will. I lived in the bordello as a bystander, just recording its daily functions. I wrote the book but the drawings are also very thorough.

It’s a much more sociological work.

But on an extreme subject. They were wonderful women. Being a dominatrix is not a profession, it’s a vocation. It was first time in my life that someone told me they told me they vomited while reading a book. It’s really rough stuff. One dominatrix named Astrid had a customer who couldn’t come that often because he could only have an orgasm if he had his fingernail pulled out with a pair of pliers. No doctor or psychiatrist would do that. They were wonderful women!

Do you see it as a form of therapy?

These guys have an obsession, and where are they going to go with such an obsession? It’s better for them to have an outlet than kill a little girl or boy in the woods. I think bordellos have a function, though it was even hard for me to take some of it. As a matter of fact, Dr. Eberhard Schorsch (1935–1991), who was the head of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sexualforschung (German Society for Sex Research), told me it’s the most thorough and complete book ever published on the subject. You have to live there [in the brothel] to get this kind of material. The prostitutes have to trust you. There was another guy who could only have an orgasm if his tongue was nailed to a block of wood. The first line of my book is “Was ist normal?” It’s absolutely relative.

Tina am Koferfenster, from Schutzengel der Hölle, 1985.

What was your first encounter with erotica?

When I was seven years old I found two girlie magazines behind my father’s books. It was the first time I was exposed to this kind of thing. When I looked at the pictures I realized that my father had gone over them with gouache.

He modified the photographs to match his pleasures?

My father didn’t like big-breasted women so he went over all the girls, retouching them to make them smaller. He was an aesthete. But I got into eroticism as an exorcism of my puritan upbringing. After my father died when I was three, I was raised Protestant by my uncle.

High expectations of moral behavior.

Morally I believe that everybody should be allowed to do whatever they want as long as they don’t hurt anybody else. Unless it’s sadomasochism and then it’s by mutual consent. What I always found fascinating in eroticism is that when you meet a woman you find out what her fantasies are. And according to her fantasies you just perform and you stage. And it’s a tremendous game. I knew a person who was aroused by medical examinations. So let’s play doctor!

What’s the difference between eroticism and pornography?

I’d say it’s the same difference between men and animals. Any animal can give you a lesson on how to do just plain sex, but eroticism is more an intellectual process, a distillation, a careful staging. It’s a way of putting into action your fantasies. It’s a long ritual. For me pornography is not erotic. I sometimes think it’s rather funny or even ridiculous.

Do you think that political satire and eroticism are connected?

They have always been very close together, not only political satire but social satire as well. When they celebrated the anniversary of the French Revolution in France, I made an erotic political satire. Napoleon Bonaparte started as a young general for the Republic, after the revolution, and where did he end up? As Napoleon the Emperor of the French. So I made a drawing of the Emperor taking Marianne, the French symbol, from behind. I was accused of depicting sodomy, but it’s not. You can take somebody from behind consensually.

How do you view humor in relation to fear?

I think humor is the best medicine against fear. Sometimes during the bombings in Alsace my whole family would just laugh away. My mother was fearless. And just the other day, a woman came to visit me in the studio and she saw a skeleton I have there. She said, “About twenty-eight years ago I came to visit you—I was six years old—and I was terrified of the skeleton. You told me the skeleton was your mother and asked me to go shake hands with her.” She overcame her fear of the skeleton. Then I told her it was a joke, because otherwise it would be a lie.

When you moved to the States you were really misunderstood.

My whole life has been about proving reality with the absurd. I’m fascinated by the absurd. I cultivate it, I practice it. And one of the most absurd things I realized when I went to America was that in the land of blues and jazz there was racial segregation—and it was immediate outrage for me. I couldn’t understand the irony. The Americans came to fight Nazi Germany, the ultimate racist regime, and then I arrive in a country where racism prevails, especially in the era of McCarthyism.

Untitled, 2013

How do you feel now going back to America?

America is really a land of contrast and contradiction, which explains all the hypocrisy. Let’s not forget though that there’s the United States of America and there’s New York, which is a completely different entity. I’ve never loved a city as much as I loved New York. Possibly Hamburg, but New York is unbelievable.

You were investigated by the FBI there.

I was kidnapped by the FBI, which was again so absurd! I even had the soles of my shoes opened up to see if there were secret messages. But after that I went back to America and New York two years ago. I was delighted. In New York—not outside of the city necessarily—there was racial harmony. To see that there’s one place where it’s possible made me very happy, because xenophobia is all over the world right now. I was born already as a child with a need and a love for peace.

A Perpetual Outsider With a Museum of His Own

STRASBOURG, France — It seemed a good moment, what with another round of sex scandals making news, to get a European perspective from Tomi Ungerer.

The Alsatian-born former bad boy of Madison Avenue, best-selling children’s book author, longtime Council of Europe good-will ambassador for children and education, and voluminous illustrator of bondage and other erotica is still going gangbusters after 77 years. “I have to warn you,” he said of his own volubility, when I arrived at his doorstep, “There’s a lot I want to say.” Frankly, I had a hard time getting a word in edgewise.
I had meant to quiz Mr. Ungerer about Silvio Berlusconi and Roman Polanski and the French culture minister who, after defending Mr. Polanski, had to go on television to explain why, as he had written in an autobiography, he paid to sleep with young men in Asia. (They have a different vetting process for government officials over here.)
To prepare, I stopped into Mr. Ungerer’s museum. Strasbourg has set one up for its native son on a big square. Since he has produced dozens of books and thousands of drawings and collected, because he’s obsessive, curious and not a little perverse, a vast assortment of toys along with back issues of everything from American Funeral Director to the Sears, Roebuck catalog, all of which he is eager to show the world, it was natural (natural if you’re Mr. Ungerer, anyway) that he would have a museum. It has been around for two years, and the other morning several dozen elderly French and German visitors escaped the autumn drizzle to peruse pictures of copulating frogs and naked women trussed up like chickens.
Mr. Ungerer lives a short drive away. He splits his time between here and the remote town in far western Ireland where his wife and children occupy a large farm. Back in the 1960s he was a wild and crazy fixture on the commercial art scene whose libertine liberalism, extraordinary facility, charm and whimsy captured a moment while leaving a few East Hampton hostesses wincing at the mere mention of his name.

Barack Obama as seen by Tomi Ungerer, part of an exhibition in Strasbourg, France.

He arrived in New York in 1956, as he likes to tell the story, with $60, a trunk full of drawings and the remnants of a disease he had caught while serving with the Camel Corps in Algeria. Assignments at Sports Illustrated and Esquire and a contract with Ursula Nordstrom, the legendary children’s book editor at Harper & Brothers, for what became “The Mellops Go Flying,” about a family of Gallic pigs, got him started. The book was a smash, and so was he.
After which he spent about a dozen years — before he moved to remote Canada to get away from it all, then back here to Europe — cornering one after another major ad campaign around the world. He also devised antiwar posters; worked for Otto Preminger and Stanley Kubrick; wrote more children’s books, not a few of which scared the living daylights out of sensitive kids; and drew deft cartoons whose pointed social satire mixed healthy outrage with a very European sort of contempt for what passed as moral behavior in American society.
“Hope is a four-letter word,” he announced the other morning, while rolling a Golden Virginia cigarette between beefy fingers — “workers’ hands,” he wanted to make clear.
“I believe in doubt,” he said.
It helps to remember that he comes from an old family of watchmakers, precise and artisanal. His father, a skilled clock designer, artist and engineer, died when his son was 3, leaving the family in penury but also leaving a library in which his son learned to dream. When Alsace became German overnight, French was banned in school, and Mr. Ungerer discovered what it meant to become rebellious.
“It gave me my first lesson in relativity and cynicism,” he recalled about that time. His second lesson came after the French returned in 1945 and treated him like a traitor for speaking with a German accent.
That’s why, or partly why, he describes Paris as “the most beautiful frame for my ugliest memories,” why he calls himself Alsatian and European but not French, and why, when he got up to answer the telephone at one point, he mixed up languages with his interlocutor like a chef making bouillabaisse.
Did I mention he kept a slave? He did that, too, years ago. He let this information drop the way one might in passing remark on having relatives in Toronto or liking walnuts. The woman had arrived at his doorstep in New York either before or after an incident during which the F.B.I. whisked him away and strip-searched him for being a possible subversive, or at least he thinks it was the F.B.I., he’s apparently not sure now — and neither was I by that point about the chronology or much else, he was talking so fast.
“I asked what she wanted,” he explained. “She said, ‘To be your slave.’ ”
What else was he supposed to do?

Illustration by Tommi Ungerer

His studio, in the attic of the house where his mother lived, includes lots of books, a stash of Barbie dolls, mannequin legs, a plastic gun, a portrait of Beethoven and, sitting under a window like a homemade Duchamp, a disconnected toilet. An old friend, Robert Walter, with whom Mr. Ungerer has worked for years on the museum and other projects, had laid out a spread of wine and croissants. Like doting relatives, they pressed a box of local chocolates on their visitor. A copy of that day’s Libération newspaper, which included a review of a show of Mr. Ungerer’s work in Paris, rested in Mr. Walter’s lap.

Tomi Ungerer, prolific artist and collector of unusual items, at home in Strasbourg, France.

Gangly in cable-knit sweater, with a mop of white hair and yellow teeth, Mr. Ungerer resembled an Irish fisherman on holiday. “With three words,” he said, holding up three fingers, “I can deflate any English aristocrat: ‘Are you Irish?’ ” He loves wordplay, crossword puzzles, dialects, accents, and clearly enjoys acting the outsider: an Alsatian in France, an Irishman in Britain, a European in America, an agnostic with a somewhat unfortunate weakness for Jewish jokes, a rake devoted to children.

“He is too intellectual for the job” was his response to the question I finally managed about Frédéric Mitterrand, the French culture minister in hot water. Mr. Ungerer also defended President Nicolas Sarkozy as a pragmatist who wanted to shake up a stuffy French system, and he calculated that Mr. Polanski had already paid for his crimes, but added that he finds nothing more horrific and unacceptable than pedophilia. A devoted children’s book author, he’s the longtime European good-will ambassador for children for a reason, he emphasized, mentioning volumes he has done lately on the Holocaust and other historical subjects for young readers.

Then he was on to Americans’ fondness for guns, the sheep his sons raise on the family farm, his landlady on West 72nd Street back in the late 1950s who turned out to own a notorious brothel (his nostalgia for America, though oddball, runs deep) and “double thinking,” which he claimed was the medical term for a condition that causes his mind to bounce around like a pinball.

Sadly, I had a train to catch. He feigned disappointment at losing an American audience for his reminiscences about America. Then, as if to himself, he said melancholy is useless. People are melancholy about good memories because they are past, he said, and melancholy about bad memories, which haunt them.

That seemed to make him melancholy. He smiled and opened the door to the gray, rainy afternoon.

Illustration by Tomi Ungerer

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:Correction: October 17, 2009
The Abroad column on Thursday, about the author and artist Tomi Ungerer, referred imprecisely to the publisher of his children’s book “The Mellops Go Flying.” When the book was published, in 1957, the company’s name was Harper & Brothers — not Harper & Row, which it became after a merger in 1962. (It is now HarperCollins.)

Wednesday, October 29, 2014

Tomi Ungerer’s illustrations, for a time, helped define Madison Ave. His work appeared in Esquire, Life, Harper’s Bazaar, The Village Voice and The New York Times. He drew the iconic Dr. Strangelove movie poster.

“Tomi influenced everybody,” said his friend and author/illustrator, Maurice Sendak. “No one, I dare say, no one was as original as Tomi Ungerer.” His distinct form of simple line drawing practically screams “the Sixties.” Ungerer drew political cartoons, illustrated iconic childrens books, such as Flat Stanley as well as drawing darkly pornographic artwork based around sadomasochistic themes.